Suspect Behind 'Biggest Cyberattack' Nabbed in Spain

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A Dutchman thought to be associated with the "biggest cyberattack
in history" last month reportedly has been arrested in Spain.

The Dutch justice ministry announced on its
website today (April 26) that a 35-year-old Dutchman,
identified only by the initials SK, had been detained on a
European warrant yesterday (April 25) in the Barcelona area.

During the
week-long series of attacks on Spamhaus, Sven Olaf Kamphuis,
a Dutchman in his mid-30s, emerged as the spokesman for Stophaus,
the group leading the attacks, which at one point reached an
unprecedented 300 gigabits per second.

After the New York Times published an article saying the attacks
were causing "widespread congestion and jamming crucial
infrastructure around the world," Kamphuis disappeared from view.
(The congestion was felt primarily in the London area, northern
Germany and the Netherlands.)

Security researcher Brian Krebs noted that Kamphuis' Facebook
account said he was a native of Amsterdam living in Barcelona.
The last posting on the account was on Wednesday (April 24).

In March, Kamphuis portrayed himself to various media outlets as
one of the founders of CyberBunker, a Dutch Web-hosting service
that proudly proclaims it will take any customers except
terrorists or child pornographers.

CyberBunker, named for the nuclear-blast-proof NATO bunker it
purports to house its servers in, has a lot of unsavory clients,
including accused cybercriminals, spammers and peddlers of fake
pharmaceuticals.

Subsequent reports have said CyberBunker moved out of the bunker
years ago. Krebs said CyberBunker's official "WHOIS" listing puts
the company in Antarctica.

Because of its nasty clients, Spamhaus put CyberBunker's range of
Internet addresses on its email and Web blacklists, which are
used by many Internet service providers worldwide to weed out
spam and unsavory material.

Kamphuis and Stophaus complained that Spamhaus' efforts were
illegal and declared that if Spamhaus would block its clients,
its clients would blockade Spamhaus with DDoS attacks, bombarding
Spamhaus and its own ISPs with huge amounts of useless Internet
traffic.